Marilyn Allen

Sonnet 100 Marilyn Allen

Sonnet 100 was written in isolation during the COVID 19 pandemic. This collection of 100 'new' sonnets was written in collaboration with voice recognition software and explores the relation between the human and the digital, a dynamic which inevitably intensified during social distancing measures imposed upon communities during the Coronavirus outbreak. Shakespeare's 100th Sonnet ("Where art thou Muse") provided the primary text from which the 100 sonnets were created. Sonnet 100 examines the potential for new narrative flows to be produced through anomalies generated between human speech and computational voice recognition. These digital sonnets are frequently nonsensical yet poetic phrases emerge which resonate with the absurdities of our social and cultural lives. Dr. Marilyn Allen is an artist, writer, lecturer and collaborator. Allen's praxis involves collaborating with technology to examine how meaning is distributed between human and digital voices. Allen explores the potential for new narrative flows to be produced through the anomalies generated between the human voice and computational voice recognition systems. Allen describes this process as enacting 'word events' which generate a speculative space for the intensification of language. The diverse collaborative iterations and interactions adopted by Allen are a methodological approach to facilitate the synthesis of different voices and agencies.